A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Of course, this is continuing from morning until morning. Jesus said to Nicodemus now, of course, this is going back now to the lifetime of our lord. And Nicodemus recall was a pharisee who had come to Jesus trying to ascertain something of the truth. So Jesus replied to Nicodemus, this of course you know is about the business of being reborn, I solemnly assure you, do not be astonished that I tell you, you must all be begotten from above.
The wind blows where it will. You hear the sound that it makes, but you don't know where it comes from. You don't know where it goes. So it is with everyone begotten of the spirit. Nicodemus then asked Jesus, how can such a thing happen?
And Jesus replied, you hold the office of teacher of Israel, and still you do not understand these matters? I solemnly assure you, we are talking about what we know. We are testifying to what we have seen. You are the ones who do not accept our testimony. If you do not believe when I tell you about earthly things, how are you to believe when I tell you about those of heaven?
No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from it, the son of man who is in heaven. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so son of man be lifted up that all who believe may have eternal life in him. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Having listened to this excerpt from the acts of the apostles, and once again, I urge you to take up your New Testament and read these first chapters chapters of the acts of the apostles so that you will get the story in its entirety and not smash smash to smithereens in daily excerpts. But you couldn't have failed to miss a certain echo of Karl Marx here, this community of property, and giving to everyone according to his need. Now here again, we have a prime example of what you can do with what we call the word of god, the gospels. Some people today take this text as the will of God for all economies of the world. This is taken as a basis, a divine foundation for what you wanna call communism with a small c.
That is where there will be no one will own anything, but all property will be held in common. This is held up as the ideal. How do you know it's the ideal? Well, look, that's the way the primitive church. Remember, this is the church you're talking about.
It's a handful of men and women, and they're living together, so they pool their resources. That is the church as of this day. Sure, there's no question about that. Now, the but there is an enormous question whether this should be the norm for all men at all times. Whether this is an ideal which any society should move towards or try to achieve.
Christ never said that at all, not even remotely. There's nothing said here that this is a universal norm for for economic systems. There's not a suggestion of it here. All we're told is that this handful of human beings who are gathered together mostly out of fear, but they were gathered together also by don't forget it by their sorrow, even almost by their despair. They were a very closely knit group.
They didn't know what was going to happen next. They didn't know what was going to happen in the next minute. They had no idea what the future held. So here they are, gathered together. And they had to eat, they had to sleep, they had to drink.
They had to have some kind of a roof over their head, so they needed money. It's that simple. So they pooled their resources. Now, anyone who's gone on a trip with a couple of friends knows what I'm talking about. It's much easier to pool your resources and to try to keep track of who's spending what for whom.
You say, oh, let's all throw in $50 or what, let's make a kitty, and then you be the treasurer and you pay out, and we'll all put in. When you get down to the bottom, we'll all toss in some more cash. It's a simple way. It's a practical way. In some instances, it may be the only way of handling a situation.
But who says that that's a universal principle of economics or sociology? And the answer is, certainly our Lord never never did. I I challenge anybody to to quote me from the New Testament where our blessed Lord talked very much about making this world something short of paradise on earth. Where there will be peace as we understand it, not his peace, but we are peace, which in most instances means the absence of war, the absence of conflict. Where there will be no poverty, where everybody there will be a a just distribution of the world's goods.
Where there will be men and women who will not envy their other people's spouses or their automobiles or their children or their houses, or their education. Our Lord never said, not the slightest word, that he had come to give us that kind of a world. Not the slightest. You know what our Lord did say? I have come to bring the sword.
And then he didn't he wasn't satisfied with saying it just that way. He goes on to say, I have come to set daughter against mother-in-law, son against father, and he goes on and on to you to say, ye, God, stop. This is terrible. You bet it's terrible. Terrible.
It is terrible. And the coming of Christ was a terribile thing. It wasn't a nice comforting triangle thing. All this talk about this the the the benevolent lord, the benevolent Christ. Of course, he was benevolent.
He was a he was an absolutely all loving savior. All but notice the word loving. And you're talking about the love of God for his creature. You're not talking about human love in any of its aspects. And if there's one thing that the Lord wants of me is my salvation, and he's going to take every means to force me into it.
Really, to force Don't be astonished what I'm saying. Just read Thompson's Hound of Heaven. Of course, no one reads it anymore. But it as a as as you know, a published poet and a great ambitious poet, I have a great admiration for poetry. But the thing is I do admire that Hound of Heaven.
It's one of the few pieces with Dante that I make any sense out of. But the thing is, we forget this that God loves us. And he treats us as though he as if he loved us because he does love us. And he's pushing us willy nilly into salvation. But we can still stand up and say, oh, I'll have none of it.
I'll have none of it. I'll have my way. That's the that's the story. It's the story of the Exodus. It's the story of our lives.
And God knows it. He knows that. See, we underrate his love, and we underrate the means he'll use to push us where we belong. It's a grievous mistake. A grievous mistake.
And somehow or other, the religion of Jesus Christ today is being turned in the direction of man in this world instead of the direction that Christ put it back to God. Why didn't God make you? He made you to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world, to be happy with him in the next. There's not a word in there about being happy in this life, being comfortable in this life, having all the food, the drink, the house, the automobile, the children, the education, and all the rest. There's not a word there about all that stuff.
Now, I'm not saying that these things are wrong. I'm saying let's have as much of it as we can. But let's not put it on Christ's lips that he said I had to have those things to be saved, because I can have them all and be damned. In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen.